Technology Lab —

Hands-on with Firefox’s new “Australis” interface

Rounded tabs, less clutter..

Yesterday, the Mozilla Foundation released the first early beta of Firefox that includes its new Australis "user experience"—a retooling of the browser interface that dramatically pares down what is surfaced to users. The latest Nightly build of Firefox version 28 is the first complete implementation of the new interface's tabs and top menu behavior.

Further Reading

While it's not a radical departure from previous interfaces, Australis does have a number of useful changes. It dispenses with the blocky tabs of the current Firefox, replacing them with curved tabs that fade into the background when not selected. This makes it easier to tell which tab is active. Australis also does a lot to clear the toolbar of unnecessary clutter, making the browser much more friendly to touch devices.

Some of the streamlining elements of Australis had already shipped with earluer releases, such as the hidden the "forward" button. Unless you've hit the "back" button to navigate to a previous page in browser history, the "forward" button is hidden. It only appears when there's something to go forward to, so it doesn't take up real estate as a grayed-out button when it's not needed. The "streamlining" of the Downloads toolbar button, which doubles as a download progress bar when a download is active, also shipped out in advance of the full Australis interface.

A new change with this Nightly is the addition of a visual pop-up menu launched from the "Customize and Control" button on the far right side of the browser's toolbar. This feature isn't included in Firefox's current release (version 25), but it should be familiar to Google Chrome users. The menu provides quick access to basic features like cut, copy and paste, printing, and history in a form that looks like it's optimized for touch.

By clicking "Customize" in the menu, you can add additional functionality buttons to the drop-down menu or to the toolbar itself. This allows you to decide whether you want add-ons like Twitter and Google Plus integration or other features to always be visible. Otherwise, you can hide them away for access in two clicks instead of one.

Update: A bug in my particular install caused "Do Not Track" to be set on in the browser. That's not, as I initially reported, a feature being pushed out with Firefox 28—use of "Do Not Track" is still left to the user to configure, a Mozilla spokesperson confirmed.

The new nightly build of Firefox features a new tab design that makes it easier to spot which tab you're actually viewing.

Sean Gallagher

The look of Australis on Windows 7 in full-screen mode.

The Firefox "Australis" interface on Windows 8.

The new "Customize and Control" pop-up menu keeps extra tools and add-ons out of the toolbar to reduce clutter.

The new setting screen for customizing Firefox's toolbar and tool pop-up menu.

186 Reader Comments

One thing you'll notice missing is the "forward" button. Unless you've hit the "back" button to navigate to a previous page in browser history, the "forward" button is hidden. It only appears when there's something to go forward to, so it doesn't take up real estate as a greyed-out button when it's not needed.

One thing you'll notice missing is the "forward" button. Unless you've hit the "back" button to navigate to a previous page in browser history, the "forward" button is hidden. It only appears when there's something to go forward to, so it doesn't take up real estate as a greyed-out button when it's not needed.

One thing you'll notice missing is the "forward" button. Unless you've hit the "back" button to navigate to a previous page in browser history, the "forward" button is hidden. It only appears when there's something to go forward to, so it doesn't take up real estate as a greyed-out button when it's not needed.

Erm, Firefox has behaved this way for a long time. Since 4 I think.

F23 on my work laptop is showing a grayed forward button now....

I'm not sure what setting you've changed, but that's definitely not the default.

Edit: Or at least it isn't on the default theme. The default theme has hidden the forward button when it's not applicable for some time.

One thing you'll notice missing is the "forward" button. Unless you've hit the "back" button to navigate to a previous page in browser history, the "forward" button is hidden. It only appears when there's something to go forward to, so it doesn't take up real estate as a greyed-out button when it's not needed.

Erm, Firefox has behaved this way for a long time. Since 4 I think.

F23 on my work laptop is showing a grayed forward button now....

Button disappears on mine with my theme though. On Linux, but don't think that makes a big difference.

Does Firefox have full sandboxing now? I stop using it after it crashed a couple times and took down all 50 tabs of mine at once.

Plugin's are sandboxed, and have been for a while. Process-per-tab is in work, and builds are available for the adventurous, but most addons don't work yet; current ETA is to have it default enabled in nightly builds in the second half of next year.

There's one last long-awaited feature now turned on by default in the Firefox 28 Nightly—the "Do Not Track" functionality. By default, users won't send notifications to advertisers when visiting websites trying to collect personal information. You will have to explicitly give permission for them to track your movements across the Web.

Possibly the worst mischaracterization of this feature I've ever seen. That's not even remotely what it does. What it does is tell advertisers not to track you. They decide whether to respect the request, and if so how to do so.

And many advertising groups have already said they won't respect this setting if it is defaulted to "no" (whereas they might if the user has selected that setting).

One thing you'll notice missing is the "forward" button. Unless you've hit the "back" button to navigate to a previous page in browser history, the "forward" button is hidden. It only appears when there's something to go forward to, so it doesn't take up real estate as a greyed-out button when it's not needed.

Erm, Firefox has behaved this way for a long time. Since 4 I think.

F23 on my work laptop is showing a grayed forward button now....

I'm not sure what setting you've changed, but that's definitely not the default.

Edit: Or at least it isn't on the default theme. The default theme has hidden the forward button when it's not applicable for some time.

If that's the case it must be an addon monkeying with something because I'm on the default theme.

I don't understand how Firefox managed to make its header take up more vertical space than Safari's even though Safari has a full-width titlebar *and* a tab bar. Safari = 77 pixels, Firefox = 78, Chrome = 73.

There's one last long-awaited feature now turned on by default in the Firefox 28 Nightly—the "Do Not Track" functionality. By default, users won't send notifications to advertisers when visiting websites trying to collect personal information. You will have to explicitly give permission for them to track your movements across the Web.

Possibly the worst mischaracterization of this feature I've ever seen. That's not even remotely what it does. What it does is tell advertisers not to track you. They decide whether to respect the request, and if so how to do so.

And many advertising groups have already said they won't respect this setting if it is defaulted to "no" (whereas they might if the user has selected that setting).

Wasn't there also a huge uproar when Microsoft did this with IE10 because people said it would make the Do Not Track flag useless as no advertiser would respect it?

One thing you'll notice missing is the "forward" button. Unless you've hit the "back" button to navigate to a previous page in browser history, the "forward" button is hidden. It only appears when there's something to go forward to, so it doesn't take up real estate as a greyed-out button when it's not needed.

Erm, Firefox has behaved this way for a long time. Since 4 I think.

F23 on my work laptop is showing a grayed forward button now....

I'm not sure what setting you've changed, but that's definitely not the default.

Edit: Or at least it isn't on the default theme. The default theme has hidden the forward button when it's not applicable for some time.

If that's the case it must be an addon monkeying with something because I'm on the default theme.

Are you using the small buttons? If not then, as you say, it's probably an extension changing something.

There's one last long-awaited feature now turned on by default in the Firefox 28 Nightly—the "Do Not Track" functionality. By default, users won't send notifications to advertisers when visiting websites trying to collect personal information. You will have to explicitly give permission for them to track your movements across the Web.

Possibly the worst mischaracterization of this feature I've ever seen. That's not even remotely what it does. What it does is tell advertisers not to track you. They decide whether to respect the request, and if so how to do so.

And many advertising groups have already said they won't respect this setting if it is defaulted to "no" (whereas they might if the user has selected that setting).

Wasn't there also a huge uproar when Microsoft did this with IE10 because people said it would make the Do Not Track flag useless as no advertiser would respect it?

There was. Did anyone ever follow up to see what the advertisers are doing?

There's one last long-awaited feature now turned on by default in the Firefox 28 Nightly—the "Do Not Track" functionality. By default, users won't send notifications to advertisers when visiting websites trying to collect personal information. You will have to explicitly give permission for them to track your movements across the Web.

Possibly the worst mischaracterization of this feature I've ever seen. That's not even remotely what it does. What it does is tell advertisers not to track you. They decide whether to respect the request, and if so how to do so.

And many advertising groups have already said they won't respect this setting if it is defaulted to "no" (whereas they might if the user has selected that setting).

HUGE mischaracterization and not fully explaining this feature does users a disservice. "Yep, I'm protected against tracking, I use Firefox" the thinking will go. The do-not-track flag is a bad idea to start with, and to default it to being turned on, a terrible one. There's no way the majority of advertisers will respect it if most browsers default it 'on'. And there is no way to know when or how you're being tracked.

The best thing a supposedly pro-user pro-privacy browser like Firefox could do to protect users from advertisers is offer better built-in advertiser HTTP blacklisting and third party cookie management. Off by default, but easily found and easy selection of publicly maintained blacklists provided, etc.

Looks like a big visual change is finally being added to the OSX version of Firefox: moving the tab bar up with the close and minimize buttons. Unlike Windows - which moved tabs up to the top, way back in version 20 (I think) - that change was never made to the OSX version, which continues to waste valuable screen real estate with the old configuration. Kudos to them finally fixing that!

One thing you'll notice missing is the "forward" button. Unless you've hit the "back" button to navigate to a previous page in browser history, the "forward" button is hidden. It only appears when there's something to go forward to, so it doesn't take up real estate as a greyed-out button when it's not needed.

Erm, Firefox has behaved this way for a long time. Since 4 I think.

F23 on my work laptop is showing a grayed forward button now....

I'm not sure what setting you've changed, but that's definitely not the default.

Edit: Or at least it isn't on the default theme. The default theme has hidden the forward button when it's not applicable for some time.

If that's the case it must be an addon monkeying with something because I'm on the default theme.

The much simpler explanation is that you updated your browser from 9 on-wards on that Mozilla only changes such things when newly installing it.

They hide the bookmarks bar by default by now, but you keep your configuration if you update from an older version. Probably same thing here.

One thing you'll notice missing is the "forward" button. Unless you've hit the "back" button to navigate to a previous page in browser history, the "forward" button is hidden. It only appears when there's something to go forward to, so it doesn't take up real estate as a greyed-out button when it's not needed.

Erm, Firefox has behaved this way for a long time. Since 4 I think.

F23 on my work laptop is showing a grayed forward button now....

I'm not sure what setting you've changed, but that's definitely not the default.

Edit: Or at least it isn't on the default theme. The default theme has hidden the forward button when it's not applicable for some time.

If that's the case it must be an addon monkeying with something because I'm on the default theme.

The much simpler explanation is that you updated your browser from 9 on-wards on that Mozilla only changes such things when newly installing it.

They hide the bookmarks bar by default by now, but you keep your configuration if you update from an older version. Probably same thing here.

That could do it. IIRC this machine was imaged with v13 preinstalled. I know I had to manually work around the automatic update block at one point to get a version with the memory leak fix for FireBug released in v17.

What was the name of the project that was to improve the general feeling of speed of the browser, ie startup time, etc? No matter how it may flip flop with others in benchmarks, I've never found it to just *feel* fast, from starting cold, to opening tabs in the background while scrolling around another, etc. Also doesn't play nice with Windows 8/Synaptics smooth scroll, as it seems to try to double smooth what's already smooth.

I've been using Opera 12.x at home for years because it handled 50-100 tabs much better than FF the last time I tried torture testing it. O also degrades much more gracefully when it's hitting the 4gb process limit in that a few features stop working (full screen video is my canary) a day or two before the heap fragments enough to cause more widespread problems or rare crash.

Whether you like the new UI changes or not, we certainly have come a long way since Firefox 1.0

Personally, I am a fan of the less UI and I think they are looking to get away from a complex menu system. It's a real balance to maintain the same features (plus more), and make them accessible and useful for the average user. I still get calls from my parents asking me how to do stuff on Firefox. Mozilla's new menu system looks interesting and I would like to see how that develops over time.

What was the name of the project that was to improve the general feeling of speed of the browser, ie startup time, etc? No matter how it may flip flop with others in benchmarks, I've never found it to just *feel* fast, from starting cold, to opening tabs in the background while scrolling around another, etc. Also doesn't play nice with Windows 8/Synaptics smooth scroll, as it seems to try to double smooth what's already smooth.

That was Snappy. I know they fixed a lot of cases where people were doing blocking calls on the main thread instead of asynchronously; but about a year ago it's lead decided that instead of using his blog as a project clearing house he wanted all the people working on it to blog about their work directly. I'm not sure what's happened with it since then because it stopped being easy to follow.

I've been using Opera 12.x at home for years because it handled 50-100 tabs much better than FF the last time I tried torture testing it. O also degrades much more gracefully when it's hitting the 4gb process limit in that a few features stop working (full screen video is my canary) a day or two before the heap fragments enough to cause more widespread problems or rare crash.

Chrome is a good option for lots of tabs, it runs multiple processes so that 4gb (actually 2gb/2gb split between kernel and user space) isn't an issue.

One thing you'll notice missing is the "forward" button. Unless you've hit the "back" button to navigate to a previous page in browser history, the "forward" button is hidden. It only appears when there's something to go forward to, so it doesn't take up real estate as a greyed-out button when it's not needed.

There's one last long-awaited feature now turned on by default in the Firefox 28 Nightly—the "Do Not Track" functionality. By default, users won't send notifications to advertisers when visiting websites trying to collect personal information. You will have to explicitly give permission for them to track your movements across the Web.

Possibly the worst mischaracterization of this feature I've ever seen. That's not even remotely what it does. What it does is tell advertisers not to track you. They decide whether to respect the request, and if so how to do so.

And many advertising groups have already said they won't respect this setting if it is defaulted to "no" (whereas they might if the user has selected that setting).

HUGE mischaracterization and not fully explaining this feature does users a disservice. "Yep, I'm protected against tracking, I use Firefox" the thinking will go. The do-not-track flag is a bad idea to start with, and to default it to being turned on, a terrible one. There's no way the majority of advertisers will respect it if most browsers default it 'on'. And there is no way to know when or how you're being tracked.

The best thing a supposedly pro-user pro-privacy browser like Firefox could do to protect users from advertisers is offer better built-in advertiser HTTP blacklisting and third party cookie management. Off by default, but easily found and easy selection of publicly maintained blacklists provided, etc.

I've corrected that in the text; that wasn't how I originally characterized the way it works, but I did so poorly that it was edited to come out that way.

Some of the other elements I've mentioned were rolled out earlier as part of the streamlining effort, and I've clarified that in the story as well.

There's one last long-awaited feature now turned on by default in the Firefox 28 Nightly—the "Do Not Track" functionality. By default, users won't send notifications to advertisers when visiting websites trying to collect personal information. You will have to explicitly give permission for them to track your movements across the Web.

Possibly the worst mischaracterization of this feature I've ever seen. That's not even remotely what it does. What it does is tell advertisers not to track you. They decide whether to respect the request, and if so how to do so.

And many advertising groups have already said they won't respect this setting if it is defaulted to "no" (whereas they might if the user has selected that setting).

Wasn't there also a huge uproar when Microsoft did this with IE10 because people said it would make the Do Not Track flag useless as no advertiser would respect it?

There was. Did anyone ever follow up to see what the advertisers are doing?

I have not yet seen a single report that a single advertiser respects that setting.